The Source for Video ⊕ New Media

Artist

Blair Fukumura

Originally from Winnipeg Manitoba, Blair Fukumura studied theatre design at the University of Winnipeg, and opera at the University of Manitoba before moving to Toronto in 1995. After a decade as a pastry chef, constructing whimsical and sardonic creations (such as his Saddam Hussein and George Bush gingerbread men), Blair made the leap into media by writing, pitching, and successfully producing a pilot episode for his own cooking show on Food Network Canada with Westwind Pictures.

Blair’s experience in television production spurred him on to more personal acts of multimedia creation, and in 2008 he produced Catalog, his first short film, a reflection on technological progress and consumption, loneliness vs. social networking. Blair’s second short, an indirect response to California’s Proposition 8 ruling, is a meditation on themed heterosexual wedding rituals, and the inherent hypocisy in using the non-traditional, traditional wedding to promote “traditional” cultural values.

Both shorts are examples’s of Blair’s “Google” collage slide shows, constructed from found images, and electronically altered digital photographs, collected in the same random manner as one would surf the internet. Using keywords to construct series of narratives and connected image sequences, Blair “browses” his short films into existence using humor and diametrically opposed images and narration.